In quality management systems, users submit a record representing a description and documentation of an issue (e.g., a defect, and/or failure) discovered during a product lifecycle. The issue can be with the product itself or manufacturing equipment associated with the product. Frequently, users (same or different users) submit multiple records for similar issues without being aware of previous records having been identified. This is a costly problem because many systemic issues are treated as “one-time”, unrelated problems, instead of being identified as patterns. Users are not aware of trends, similar problems, or simultaneous efforts to resolve like issues. Currently, quality analysts rely on keyword or identifier searches, domain knowledge, and other unreliable and error-prone techniques to find similar issues and often misidentifying larger systemic problems and trends.